Headline

Director, Global Professional Services & Forward-Deployed Engineering | SaaS/PaaS Data & AI Platforms | Helping Enterprises Turn Data into AI-Ready Value

About

I lead Global Professional Services at Pentaho — an enterprise data management platform sold across on-prem, hyperscaler PaaS, and OEM-embedded SaaS — embedded within the Sales organization as a core member of the selling team. My work bridges product, customer implementation, and revenue: structuring services as part of the deal, scoping architecture alongside Solutions Engineers, and turning services into a growth line rather than a cost center. Over 20 years in the enterprise data platform space, I've built and scaled global teams across Professional Services, Customer Success, and Product Support — spanning EMEA, APAC, and NAMER. The thread running through all of it: enterprise AI and analytics initiatives succeed or stall based on the data foundation underneath them. My focus has been aligning services, sales, and product around that reality — and turning that alignment into measurable revenue, retention, and adoption. A few things I am proud of: - Directly accountable for a $3M services revenue target inside a Sales organization carrying a $50M annual revenue goal — with services revenue and CS-driven ARR expansion as formal KPIs - Grew Professional Services revenue with high delivery margins, lifting team utilization QoQ - Launched a new Micro Services offering that generated cross-sell revenue within its first six months — turning an underused team into a growth line - Led an AI innovation initiative to build an agentic migration platform, now driving customer conversion from competing data tools - Partnered with Sales, Pre-Sales, and Product leadership to redesign how services get scoped, priced, and delivered — from AI assisted upgrade estimation to bundled onboarding packages - Scaled a regional APAC team into a 10-person org covering 60% of global ticket volume, sustaining 95%+ CSAT throughout

Location

Greater Bengaluru Area

AI stack

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Microsoft Copilot

Work experience

Director of Professional Services & Forward Deployed Engineering at Hitachi, Mar 2025 - Present · 1 yr 9 mos, Bengaluru, - Own global PS strategy across regions, driving $3M+ in revenue at high delivery margins - Leading our AI innovation agenda — built an agentic migration platform with enterprise prospects, aimed at accelerating adoption from competing data integration tools - Redesigned how Sales and SE teams scope services, launching upgrade packages and an estimation calculator that cut deal friction - Partnered with Sales and Pre-Sales to build working prototypes in client environments, proving scalability to overcome cloud-transition apprehensions. - Built new bundled services + licensing offerings to help new customers reach value faster - Leading platform modernization advisory — containerized, auto-scaling architectures for legacy data environments - Standardized PSA operations by piloting Rocketlane automation, projected to eliminate multi-system delivery delays and save ~20% of annual operational hours.

Director of Customer Success & Services at Hitachi Vantara, Feb 2023 - Mar 2025 · 2 yrs 2 mos, - Repositioned Customer Success from cost center to revenue driver, launching a Micro Services offering that generated $500K in year one - Stepped into high-risk account scenarios to build hybrid cloud modernization plans, demonstrating subset implementations to retain accounts considering competitive migration. - Built new career paths for CS and support talent by opening up services engagements they could own - Designed a Customer 360 dashboard combining Support, Sales, Services, and Enterprise Architecture data to drive proactive account health management - Established a structured field-to-engineering feedback loop, translating customer architectural gaps directly into product roadmap priorities. - Partnered with senior leadership on org-wide initiatives to unify the customer journey across Sales, Pre-Sales, Services, and CS

Manager of Customer Success at Hitachi Vantara, May 2017 - Jan 2023 · 5 yrs 9 mos, - Led a team of Enterprise Architects and L3 Support engineers serving APAC's financial services, manufacturing, healthcare and SMB customers - Owned strategic enterprise account relationships — quarterly business reviews, roadmap presentations, and cross-functional escalation management - Grew the APAC team from a regional unit to 10 people, extending coverage to EMEA and handling 60% of global ticket volume - Sustained 95%+ CSAT while rolling out a new SLA tiering model that cut case aging by 20%

Senior Project Manager at GrayMatter Software, Sep 2011 - Apr 2017 · 5 yrs 8 mos, Bengaluru

Lead Technical Consultant at HP, Jul 2005 - Aug 2011 · 6 yrs 2 mos, Bengaluru, Lead Technical Specialist with comprehensive expertise across the data lifecycle, specializing in Informatica development & administration, Control-M scheduling, and OS programming. Proven track record of steering cross-functional initiatives, leading high-impact data engineering projects for the HP IPG team and the Solution Engineering Centre.

Education

Bachelor of Engineering, Computer Science, Siddaganga Institute of Technology (SIT), Tumkur